Cornelius - SHIT

Patricia Cornelius is a playwright, screenwriter and novelist. Her most recent play, SHIT, was presented at the 2017 Sydney Festival, following its 2015 Melbourne premiere as part of MTCs NEON Season and its 2016 remount at 45Downstairs. Her play, Savages (45Downstairs), won the Victorian Premiers Literary Award for Drama in 2014 and the Green Room Award for Writing and was nominated for an AWGIE and the Griffin Prize. Over her career Patricia has written over 25 plays which include Big Heart, Do Not Go Gentle, The Call, Love, Fever, Boy Overboard, Slut and Whos Afraid of the Working Class? (co-written with Andrew Bovell, Christos Tsiolkas, Melissa Reeves and Irine Vela). Other playwriting awards include Victorian and NSW Premiers Literary Awards (2011), Patrick White Playwrights Award, Richard Wherrett Prize, Wal Cherry Award and nine AWGIES for stage, community theatre, and theatre for young people. She won the Australian Writers Foundation Playwriting Award (2015), a Patrick White Fellowship (2012), a Fellowship from the Australia Councils Theatre Board, as well as the AWGIE Major Award three times.

She is a founding member of Melbourne Workers Theatre. Patricia co-wrote the feature film adaptation, Blessed, based on the play Whos Afraid of the Working Class? (for which she won an AWGIE), and she is currently developing a feature film. Her novel, My Sister Jill, was published by Random House. Many of her plays are published by Currency Press. The Obscenity of the Feminine Alison Croggon Woman is literally a monster: a failed and botched male who is only born female due to an excess of moisture and of coldness during the process of conception. Aristotle Theres not a single moment when the three young women transcend their ugliness. Theres no indication of a better or in fact any inner life.

They dont believe in anything. Theyre mean, downmouthed, downtrodden, hard bit, utterly damaged women. Theyre neither salt of the earth nor sexy. They love no-one and no-one loves them. They believe the world is shit, that their lives are shit, that they are shit. Program note for SHIT, by Patricia Cornelius If only progress were actually a thing. If it were, women writing plays about women would be as unexceptional as men writing plays about men.

And yet even now, half a century after the second wave of feminism, it remains true that to contemplate the female body outside the purview of the male gaze remains a radical act. Its not an accident that over the past decade much of the most exciting new Australian theatre has come from women and queer theatre makers. From the profound queer theatre of director Adena Jacobs, to the Rabble Theatres confronting explorations of abjection, to the formal playfulness of Lally Katz, female artists have been breaking open the aesthetic and intellectual conventions that underlie how we make and witness theatre. One of the most striking things about this body of work is its variousness. By exposing how gender profoundly shapes our perceptions and behaviour, women and queer theatre makers are challenging every aspect of what it means to make a performance and what it means to work within a tradition. Its no surprise that each of the plays in this bookSHIT by Patricia Cornelius, MinusOneSister by Anna Barnes and Muff by Van Badhamis completely different from the others, with its own aesthetic and thematic concerns.

Cornelius takes as her subject the most damaged women in our society, marginalised by poverty, sexual violence and the systemic brutalisation of state care. Barness archetypal family is rich and privileged, like that in the classic Greek tragedy which she uses as the springboard for her own work. Badhams play is about the sexual violence lurking inside the intimate relationships of three middle-class characters. Put together, they make a fascinating trilogy. In each of these plays, women are looking back. What they each represent in different ways is the obscenity that exists at the heart of femininity.

Its a truism that the canon of Western art has, for the past few centuries, been the art of men. Men made the art, men owned the art and men determined which artworks were significant. Womenor perhaps, more properly, Womanhas existed in art either as an idealised object, exemplified by the iconic nude or the madonna, or as the personification of monstrosity, closely related to death. The feminine, as Julie Kristeva says in her classic study Powers of Horror, is abject. Woman is the source of idealised desire, but the feminine is also everything that the masculine subject seeks to eject from its own definition of selfhood: weakness, ambiguity, fluidity, and maternal and sexual horror. Almost all of our most famous fictional womenAnna Karenina, Lady Macbeth, Nora Helmerwere written by men.

Behind this is the pervasive assumption that artistic brilliance is a masculine property. The 19th-century writers who survived the heavy social prohibitions against creative women were considered exceptional and transgressive. Like George Sand they were masculine, not proper women at all; or like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in the terminology of the day, a celebrated invalid, they were considered too physically frail to withstand the fires of creative genius. By embracing artistic creation, they became at best oddities: women who betrayed the function of their womanhood. Its a shame we cant relegate these attitudes to the archives of the 19th century. Two centuries later, they are flourishing.

Women still struggle to reach parity with men in all areas of artistic creation, as subjects and as artists. Art by women, especially if its art about women, is still considered a specialist sub-branch, of interest only to a specific audience. The experiences of women still struggle to be granted the universality that is habitually granted to the experiences of men. This, of course, extends to all categories habitually labelled other. White able-bodied male heterosexual cis subjectivity is still the default authority, and that is inevitably both rooted and reflected in notions of authorship in a self-confirming spiral. Its one thing to recognise the concept of the imperial male gaze in all axes of art and life, its quite another to undo centuries of internalisation, to actively question and reconstitute what constitutes female subjectivity and agency.

One way to begin is to look squarely at the obscenity of the feminine. This obscenity exists in two ways: in the violence, overt and covert, which polices the limits of acceptable femininity; and in the concepts of femaleness and femininity themselves. The three plays in this book examine the obscenity of femininity in both these senses. Anna Barness MinusOneSister uses Aeschyluss trilogy The Oresteia to examine the structures of patriarchal violence within a nuclear family. The action in The Oresteia is sparked by the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father, Agamemnon, to ensure good winds for his ships in his war on Troy. This in turn provokes Clytemnestras revenge killing of her husband, and Clytemnestras murder, in revenge for his father, by her son Orestes.

Clytemnestra is the archetypal monstrous woman: in turn a monstrous wife, a monstrous mother who must be killed by the young hero, and, in the form of the Furies, a supernatural monstrosity who hounds Orestes from beyond the grave. In